Weird Error after VS2005 Crash & The K.I.S.S. Principle

Argh! Nearly an hour wasted,

I was building a source tree today for a new TFS installation and in the middle of my workday VS2005 decided to puke on the screen. It straight up died, froze, hung, whatever you want to call it, it was gone and it wasn’t coming back. I was forced to kill the process after taking a 10 minute break and seeing it still hung.

Prior to the crash, the solution built fine. The solution had 32 projects in it and everything was running smoothly. After the crash I restarted VS2005 and then re-built the solution. VS2005 BARFs on a file.

The error I get is something like this:

“metadata file could not be opened (… file path ..) — file is corrupt”

 

Huh? So I try moving references, adding them, deleting them, changing namespaces, changing dll names, everything.

I then try to open up the DLL in Reflector and I get the gem:

“File is not a portable executable. DOS header does not contain ‘MZ’ signature”

 

What? This solution just build 5 minutes ago, I didn’t change anything except a crash.

Well, apparently when the crash happened, that particular project GOT HOSED, BAD. Who knows how, who knows why, but it did. I took a back up copy, replaced it on top of that project and rebuilt the solution and like magic it starts working again.

So, if this happens to you, just drop the project get another copy, then re-add it and hopefully it works. I hate giving these types of answers, but unless I go digging into the root cause of the crash (would could take forever in a project like VS2005) I wont know what exactly caused it. CRAPPY MAN, CRAPPY.

Moral of the story: This takes it back to the “K.I.S.S.” principle. I spent nearly an hour trying to fix this problem by tracking it down and moving things around, troubleshooting, etc. I should have just tried the “replace” first and I would have saved an hour.

So, Next time…

Keep it simple, stupid.